This is the explanatory 'key' print to the group of three views of Trafalgar and its aftermath by Serres (PAI6132 [ PAI5438 is a second copy], PAI6144 and PAI 6134), which replicate the 12 x 6 foot views that he exhibited as adjuncts to his Panorama of Boulogne at Wigley's Great Room, 5 Spring Gardens from 31 March 1806. The Boulogne panorama had opened on 22 November 1804 (key print in the John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library). Both events were early if not the first uses of the Great Room as a display venue for panoramic paintings, though it continued as such intermittently into the 1820s as shown by 'The Moving Panorama or Spring Gardens Rout', an 1823 caricature print (by C. Williams, pub. S.W. Fores) of the exterior when the Marshalls' moving panoramas of the coronation of George IV and of the River Clyde were being shown there. The BM holds a copy of this print, which is reproduced, inter alia, in Richard Altick's 'Shows of London' (1978). Wigley appears to have been the entrepreneur and publisher rather than Serres, who was by this time in increasing financial trouble from the actions of his fantasist wife (later the fraudulent, self-styled 'Princess Olive of Cumberland'). Her actions would eventually lose him the Royal patronage that, in 1806, he could still advertise in promoting his Trafalgar paintings: e.g. in 'The Times' (p.1.) of 31 March 1806:

‘THE TRAFALGAR EXHIBITION, at the PANORAMA of BOULOGNE, Spring Gardens, of Admiral Lord NELSON’S glorious Engagement with the Combined Fleets of France and Spain, and a Representation of the Storm after the Action, with the Destruction of the Prizes off Cadiz; each Picture, 12 feet by 6 feet; painted by Mr. Serres, Marine Painter to the King, Duke of Clarence, and Board of Admiralty, from the most authentic information, will be opened THIS DAY, at 1 o’clock. Admittance 1s.’

The advertisement immediately below announces the forthcoming ‘Change at the Panorama Leicester Square’ from Robert Barker’s ‘celebrated View of Gibraltar’ to his Trafalgar panorama which is 'in great forwardness’. This much larger view opened in July 1806 but Barker was the progenitor of panorama as a form, so Serres and Wigley were fairly ahead of the game in this instance.

At least two of the Wigley prints were also, presumably subsequently, reissued by Fairburn: see PAI5440 and PAI5441, with a matching one of Strachan's post-Trafalgar mop-up action of 4 November 1805 (PAI5439). The NMM collection does not include a Fairburn version of PAI6132 (or PAI5438, a duplicate copy), which shows the start of Trafalgar, but there presumably was one. [ TBC: PvdM 7/07]